A Miami Museum Is Launching an Exhibition Exclusively Made for Instagram. It’s Called ‘Joyous Dystopia,’ of Course

Public art used to mean sculptures in parks or billboards on
busy city highways. Now, one museum is taking art to the people
where they really live: on their phones.

The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach is launching an exhibition
exclusively on Instagram, posting a series of works on a new social
media account, @TheBassSquared. The show, which opens today, is
called “Joyous Dystopia” and has been organized by David Gryn,
founder of Daata Editions, an online platform for native digital
and new media work.

A new artist’s work will debut on the platform each week for the
show’s eight-week run. The participating artists are: Bob
Bicknell-Knight, Jeremy Couillard, Keren Cytter, Elliot Dodd,
Anaïs Duplan, Rosie McGinn, Eva Papamargariti, and Scott
Reeder.

“Some of them are creating one-minute videos, some new work is
[being] made to fit within the medium,” Gryn told artnet News. Each
artist has previously worked with Daata Editions, and Gryn—who also
spent eight years curating the film program at Art Basel Miami
Beach—thought they would be open to tackling this new exhibition
strategy.

The Bass curator Leilani Lynch stressed the importance of
creating a separate online platform for the show in the form of The
Bass² Instagram account. In order “delineate the artist’s content,”
she told artnet News, “we want this to exist purely as an
exhibition space.”

The show came to fruition thanks to a Knight Foundation
Prototype Grant, which gave organizers the resources to make
something new and work with artists to develop custom work, instead
of, say, just doing an artist-Instagram takeover of the main Bass
Museum account.

The artists aren’t out purely to celebrate the form, however.
The exhibition’s spirit—about finding humor and joy in potentially
unsettling circumstances—means that some of the work reflects a
discomfort with the medium and how it can be used to distract from
real life. “They are commenting on more than just the platform
itself, but how they, as artists, interact with it, sometimes with
a quizzical, cynical spin,” Gryn says.

The show will kick off this evening to coincide with a
discussion between Leilani and Gryn at the Bass, and will run
through September 2019 online.

The post A Miami Museum Is Launching an Exhibition
Exclusively Made for Instagram. It’s Called ‘Joyous Dystopia,’ of
Course appeared first on artnet News.